The Red Knight

still lay on the floor having been removed, and each squire held a vambrace, wiping them down with chamois.

She smiled radiantly at them. ‘Begone,’ she said.

They fled, as adolescent boys do when faced with beautiful women.

The king sat back on his bench. ‘Ah! I see I have won your esteem!’ he grinned, and for a moment he was twenty years younger.

She knelt and undid a garter. ‘You are the king. You, and you alone, need never win my esteem.’

He watched her unbuckle the other garter. She buckled the two of them together and placed his leg harnesses together on a table behind her, and then, without hurry, she sat in his lap and put her arms around his neck and kissed him until she felt him stir.

And then she rose to her feet and unlaced her gown. She did it methodically, carefully, without taking her eyes off him.

He watched her the way a wolf watches a lamb.

The gown fell away leaving her kirtle – a sheath of tight silk from ankle to neck.

The king rose. ‘Anyone might come in here,’ he said into her hair.

She laughed. ‘What care I?’

‘On your head be it, lady,’ he said, and produced a knife. He pressed the flat of the point against the skin of her neck and kissed her, and then cut the lace of her kirtle from neck to waist, the knife so sharp that the laces seemed to fall away, and his cut so careful that the blade never touched her skin through the linen shift beneath it.

She laughed into his kiss. ‘I love it when you do that,’ she said. ‘You owe me a lace. A silk one.’ Her long fingers took the knife from him. She stepped back and cut the straps of her shift at her shoulders and it fell away and she stabbed the knife into the top of the table so that it stuck.

He rid himself of his shirt and braes with more effort and far less elegance, and she laughed at him. And then they were together.

When they were done, she lay on his chest. Some of his hair was grey. She played with it.

‘I am old,’ he said.

She wriggled atop him. ‘Not so very old,’ she said.

‘I owe you more than a kirtle lace of silk,’ he said.

‘Really?’ she asked, and rose above him. ‘Never mind the shift, love – Mary will replace the straps in an hour.’

‘I was not being so literal. I owe you my life. I owe you – my continued interest in this endless hell that is kingship.’ He grunted.

She looked down. ‘Endless hell – but you love it. You love it.’

The king pulled her down and hid his face in her hair. ‘Not as much as I love you.’

‘What is it?’ she asked, playing with his beard. ‘You are plagued by something . . . ?’

He sighed. ‘One of my favourite men left me today. Ranald Lachlan. Because he has to make himself a fortune in order to wed your Lady Almspend.’

She smiled. ‘He is a worthy man, and he will prove himself or die trying.’

The king sighed. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But by God, woman, I was tempted to give him a bag of gold and a knighthood to keep him by me.’

‘And you would have deprived him of the glory of earning his way,’ she said.

He shrugged and said, ‘It is good that one of us is an idealist.’

‘If you are in a giving mood,’ she said, ‘might we have a tournament?’

The king was a strong man with a fighter’s muscles, and he sat up despite her weight on his chest. ‘A tournament. By God, lady – is that what this was in aid of?’

She grinned at him. ‘Was it so bad?’

He shook his head. ‘I should be very afraid, were you to decide to do something I didn’t fancy, inside that pretty head. Yes, of course we can have a tournament. But the wrong men always win, and the town’s a riot for a week, and the castle’s a mess, you, my dear, are a mess, and I have to arrest men whose only crime was to drink too much. All that, for your whim?’ He laughed.

Desiderata laughed, throwing her head back, and she read his desire in his eyes. ‘Yes!’ she said. ‘All that for my whim.’

He laughed with her. And then frowned. ‘And there are the rumours from the north,’ he said.

‘Rumours?’ she asked. Knowing full well what they were – war and worse in the northlands, and incursions from the Wild. It was her business to know them.

The king shrugged. ‘Never mind, love. We shall have a tournament, but it may have to wait until after the spring campaign.’

She clapped her hands. Spring was, at last, upon them.

Chapter Three

The Red Knight

Lissen Carak – The Red Knight

Amy’s Hob managed to get his nag to a gallop for long enough to reach the Captain in good time. The company was stretched out along the road in march order – no wagons, no baggage, no followers. Those were in camp with a dozen lances as guards.

‘Lord – Gelfred says he’s found its earth. Away in the forest. Trail and hole.’ Amy’s Hob was a little man with a nose that had been broken as often as he’d been outlawed.

The scout held up his hunting horn, and in it was a clod of excrement.

The fewmets, thought the captain, wrinkling his nose in distaste. Gelfred’s revenge for his impiety – sometimes close adherence to the laws of venery could constitute their own revenge. He gave the scout a sharp nod. ‘I’ll just take Gelfred’s word for it, shall I?’ he said. He stood in his stirrups and bellowed ‘Armour up, people!’

Word moved down the column faster than a galloping horse. Men and women laced their arming caps and donned their helmets – tall bassinets, practical kettle hats, or sturdy barbutes. Soldiers always rode out armed from head to foot – but only a novice or an overeager squire rode in his helmet or gauntlets. Most knights didn’t don their helmets until they were in the face of the enemy.

Michael brought the captain’s high-peaked helmet and held it high over his head to slide the mail aventail, the cape that protected the neck and depended from the lower rim of the helmet, over his shoulders. Then he seated the helmet firmly on the padded arming cap, visor pinned up.

The captain motioned for his squire to pause and reached up to pull the ends of his moustache clear of the mail. He was very proud of his moustache. It did a great deal to hide his age – or lack of it.

Then Michael adjusted the fall of the aventail over his breastplate, checked the buckles under his arms, and pushed the gauntlets on to his master’s hands, one at a time, while the captain watched the road to the north.

‘How far up the road?’ he asked Hob.

‘A little farther. We’ll cross the burn and then follow it west into the trees.’

He had the second gauntlet on, and Michael unbuckled the captain’s riding sword and took his long war sword from Toby, who was standing between them on foot, holding it out, a look of excitement on his plain face and a biscuit in his free hand.

Michael handed the shorter riding sword down to Toby, and girded him with the sword of war. Three and a half pounds of sharp steel, almost four feet long.

The weight always affected the captain – that weight at his side meant business.

He looked back, standing a little in his stirrups, feeling the increased weight of his armour.